Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia created and edited by the masses, is picking up its St. Petersburg, Fla., roots and replanting them in San Francisco, where it plans to grow its operation.

It already has found office space in the city's South Park neighborhood, a hub for Web 2.0 development, and is hiring about half a dozen new employees. San Francisco, picked in part for its high-tech community, also will be the scene of the next act for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia.

Founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001, wikipedia.org has grown into the Web's sixth-largest site, with 244.5 million visitors in October, according to comScore, a firm that tracks Internet traffic.

It has also changed the nature of online reference tools. By its own count, it now comprises more than 9.1 million articles in 252 languages, all produced by its users. The English version alone includes some 2.1 million entries, from the plot and details of Walt Disney's latest film, "Enchanted," to an analysis of the geology of the Death Valley area.

Wiki software lets people automatically make changes, encouraging anyone from around the globe to contribute to a Wikipedia article. It means that experts in a wide range of fields can collaborate to create a catalog of up-to-the-minute data. But it's also criticized for inaccurate information and for pranksters who purposefully insert nasty or inappropriate comments.

Wales, who in 2004 also co-founded Wikia Inc., a for-profit wiki company in San Mateo, is philosophical about the process. In an interview with The Chronicle this week, Wales - who commutes between his family home in Florida and an apartment in the city - shared his plans for Wikipedia, which include testing a program to help protect the site from repeated vandalism.

Q:Why is the Wikimedia Foundation growing?

A: The volume of stuff going on continues to increase. We need more tech staff, for example, to drive the software forward faster and to help manage and keep the Web site running. We've never done a really good job of raising money because we don't need that much money. But we have a lot of ambitions as a charity to expand our support for people working in the languages of the developing world, and basically trying to bring Wikipedia to more people around the world.

Q:Are we going to see changes to Wikipedia?

A: There are ongoing efforts to introduce WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editing, but it's a really tough problem. It's always been our intention that (the editing experience) is approachable, that anyone can do it. As we've added more features, it's a little more complicated for newcomers to edit. An editing experience that's much more like what people would be familiar with like Microsoft Word - we want to make that happen.

Q:Do you plan on adding more audio and video features?

A: There's not a lot of demand for that from the community. An encyclopedia is inherently textual. Audio or video is a little tricky because it's hard to collaboratively edit it. People can just submit stuff, but if you don't like it, you can't fix it, so it doesn't really fit our style.

The biggest change is going to be tried out in German Wikipedia first. Right now we have to protect articles if someone is causing trouble. But what we would rather do is leave everything to editing at all times. Instead of protecting so people can't edit, we'll have it so newcomers' edits don't go live immediately if we don't know them as part of the community. They only go live once the community has looked at it.

Q:Why Germany?

A: It's a stereotype, but Germans are really fetishists about quality. They really wanted to move forward in the direction for solving the problem.

The incentive to vandalize Wikipedia is people will see it and think that's funny. (But) if you know no one is going to see it except some Wikipedia volunteer who just ignores it, maybe people will vandalize less.

On the other hand, we don't know what it'll do to the participation. People like the instant feedback. You edit and it shows up live on the site immediately. That's really exciting to newcomers, so if newcomers don't have that experience, will they be dissuaded? So we're going to try it out.

The other reason is (the German Wikipedia) is the second-largest Wikipedia. It's big enough to serve as a representative for if we did it in English, French and other big languages.

Q:Do you worry that the process will not be as democratic?

A: Some people are idiots and some aren't. You have to acknowledge that and empower the good people to control the quality. But we've always been very flat and open to participation and new people joining. We know the current system works, and we also know it has certain weakness and certain strengths. We want to address the weaknesses without killing the strengths.

Q:Do you plan on adding other Web 2.0 elements, such as ranking entries or users or offering user profiles?

A: Probably not. Metrics for rating users is not under consideration because we don't see anything useful there. If you imagine that you took a job someplace where you're required to wear a name badge, but on that badge it says how many people like you and don't like you, this is not a healthy social environment. (When) you have a point system ... people start to do whatever they can to increase the points they are getting, which may or may not be the right behaviors.

Q:Do you think we're in a Web 2.0 bubble?

A: This boom feels a lot more sane so far than the previous boom. There are business models that are functional and work now. Companies can actually see how to get to profitability. Some of them, not all of them, will. I've seen some criticism of some companies, which I think is valid. If you're building a company and your business model is to get enough traffic to sell to Google, you probably have a problem.

Q:Wikipedia started the wiki movement, which enables a community of users to create and edit Web sites. What do you think of your copycats?

A: I think it's kind of cool. I would like to see a lot more. I think we're still very much in the beginning of user-generated content. You can think of tons and tons examples of things that people could collaborate and build together. Some of that stuff is going to be very obscure, but just like in a bookstore ... books about birds (are not) No. 1 best-sellers. They're steady things. To me that's the kind of thing the amateur birding community could easily build together, a bird-watching guide, and keep it updated, modified and make it useful and more comprehensive. I don't think we've seen nearly all that we're going to see.

Q:Do you worry that people at some point will feel like their work here is done?

A: I used to worry. Part of the appeal in the early days of Wikipedia (was that) you could click on Africa and there (would be) nothing there and you (could be) the first person to type, "Africa is a continent." Whereas now to write a brand new article on something that does not already exist is kind of hard in English. You're writing about fairly obscure topics. But we haven't seen participation decline at all. It continues to grow.

Q:Do you worry people will suddenly decide they don't want to contribute for free and demand to be paid?

A: We haven't seen anything remotely like that ... because it's fun. One of my rants is against the term "crowdsourcing," which I think is a vile, vile way of looking at that world. This idea that a good business model is to get the public to do your work for free - that's just crazy. It disrespects the people. It's like you're trying to trick them into doing work for free.

What you're really in the business of is providing a nice place for people to come and do what they want to do. We're going to use advertising to build this social place, and people will come only if we provide them with tools and the social environment they need to have fun. If the by-product of that is some amazing work, that's great, too.